The mind of a National Lampooner, the heart of a Delta House frat boy.That was Harold Ramis, the comedy writer, actor and director who died Monday at age 69.

The mind of a National Lampooner, the heart of a Delta House frat boy.

That was Harold Ramis, the comedy writer, actor and director who died Monday at age 69, from complications due to an autoimmune disorder.

The Chicago-born Ramis had a singular knack for wringing smart laughs out of the dumbest of situations, his vast influence still being seen in the work of such latter-day admirers as Judd Apatow, Seth MacFarlane and Thomas Lennon.

Although Ramis honed his comedy chops on the brainy multimedia satire of the National Lampoon, an offshoot of the cerebral Harvard Lampoon, he recognized, like his idol Groucho Marx before him, that the biggest laughs often came from the stupidest of set-ups.

This talent made him a triple threat on screens both small and large in his heyday from the 1970s through 1990s: as head writer and cast member on the SCTV comedy show, co-writer of Animal House and director/co-writer of Caddyshack and Groundhog Day, each innovative in its own daffy way.

It was Ramis who recognized the comic potential of the puppet gopher that plagues Bill Murray’s slovenly groundskeeper in Caddyshack, the 1980 golf club comedy that initially had a lukewarm reception from both audiences and critics (the New York Times called it “an amiable mess”) but which endured to become a laugh classic.

“We saw there was this amazing opportunity to actually create the life of the gopher underground,” Ramis told the American Film Institute in 2009, in an interview viewable on YouTube.

“We had so much Bill Murray material that we thought, well, let’s give him his antagonist, because it will actually flesh out the story completely.”

As an actor, Ramis was known for his deadpan reserve behind owlish spectacles. He often played brainiacs, such as Star Trek’s serioso Leonard Nimoy and BBC documentarian/thinker Kenneth Walsh, two of his many SCTV riffs.

His best-known character was Egon Spengler, the most unflappable of the three spook chasers in the 1984 movie hit Ghostbusters, which Ramis co-wrote with Canada’s Dan Aykroyd, a close friend.

That smart/dumb dichotomy was brilliantly presented in a scene where Spengler uses a Twinkie to explain to his fellow Ghostbusters how the spirits they were collaring were dangerously amassing explosive energy.

If the ghosts were to be shaped into one of the popular snacks, he warned, “It would be a Twinkie 35 feet long, weighing approximately 600 pounds.”

He then closed his apocalyptic warning by calmly munching upon a Twinkie.

A 2004 profile of Ramis by Tad Friend in The New Yorker magazine neatly summed up the comic reach of Ramis:

“What Elvis did for rock and Eminem did for rap, Harold Ramis did for attitude: he mass-marketed the sixties to the seventies and eighties. He took his generation’s anger and curiosity and laziness and woolly idealism and gave it a hyper-articulate voice. He wised it up.”

The same article quoted Aykroyd as describing how Ramis would always want to party with his most boisterous friends, which included comic actors Murray and John Belushi, but he’d always be the take-charge guy at the end. Ramis, Aykroyd recalled, would be the reveller who, “after the all-night drunk, announces, ‘That was fun, but now we’ve got to take the cars out of the pool.’ ”

Ramis was modest about his achievements, which also included co-writing the 1979 camping comedy Meatballs (one of the most successful movies ever made in Canada) and the 1981 army comedy Stripes, both starring his good pal Murray and directed by Canada’s Ivan Reitman, who also helmed Ghostbusters.

He attributed his success to knowing the difference between a good joke and a bad one. That’s why, as he told the AFI, so many of his films ended up on all-time comedy best-of lists:

“The difference between a cliché and a convention is that when we see something done badly, we call it a cliché. When it’s done well, we respect it as a convention. It’s also the difference between stereotype and archetypes. When a character is portrayed poorly, we say it’s a stereotype. When they’re great, they’re archetypes. And certainly these movies that are on these lists, these tend to be the archetypes.”

Ramis also understood why he could get away with using a demonstrably fake gopher in Caddyshack, which today would undoubtedly be conjured by CGI.

He just remembered how well fake props worked in The Wizard of Oz:

“When it goes to Oz, it’s like a stage musical … The sets and props, everything looks like it’s cardboard. It’s very flat and two-dimensional. The trees look funny. But it really doesn’t matter at all … you just go with it because it’s the happiest musical ever.”

For reasons that even he found puzzling, Ramis wasn’t able to continue his runaway success through the 21st Century. His last big hit was Analyze This in 1999, which he directed and also co-wrote, anticipating the rise of TV’s The Sopranos with its story of Billy Crystal playing reluctant shrink to Robert De Niro’s neurotic mob boss.

It was followed by Analyze That, a tepid sequel that did lesser box office. Many other Ramis projects of the past 15 years had trouble finding an audience, such as Year One, his 2009 caveman comedy starring Jack Black and Canada’s Michael Cera.

Ramis no doubt took comfort in knowing that one day, even films as critically shunned as Year One might grow in stature.

That’s exactly what happened to Caddyshack, as he told the AFI with a smile. He noticed how the rating for the film in the old TV Guide magazine improved after the film had been out for a decade.

“Caddyshack was a two-star movie for the first 10 years. Then at some point, I noticed that it got a third star in the same publication … I thought maybe it was like wine. The longer you keep it, it just gets a little better.”

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